One moment

God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them (1 John 4:16b)

Creation speaks; sometimes, we hear. Occasionally, we understand, but words are insufficient, their poverty apparent.

She was nine, maybe 10, simultaneously dismounting her bike while holding it against the gravity of the steep slope where Belmont meets Maple Avenue.  Pony tail trailing behind her, she dug her feet into the sidewalk and stopped just before her front tire tumbled over the curb and into the street as cars braked for a red light.

“Be careful little one,” I said, as she stopped fewer than 10 feet from my bumper. She couldn’t have heard me. The car windows were closed, but something within sprang open as an awareness rushed in to fill every corner of my consciousness.

I saw her face, the look in her eyes, and in an instant felt how wondrously precious life is, her life, every life, and what an unspeakable tragedy it would be for that life to be lost and the world denied whatever beauty will come to be through the precious, irreplaceable years she has on this good and green earth.

But these are mere words, and there were no words in that moment, only awareness, an intuition of life as a holy and unimaginable gift—and love, love for the life of that girl, love for my own life and all the loves within it that so love me in spite of myself, love for the inexplicable Source of the loving awareness that evaporated every other thought and feeling for one precious second.

Whatever we know of God in this life, whatever our senses can perceive and hold, savor and share (in some utterly inadequate way) was present in that awareness, as love banished everything from my soul but its own wondrous reality, freeing my heart to see as love sees and to know as God knows.

David L. Miller